Businesses and other organizations may engage in many transactions during the course of operations. As a result, there are numerous opportunities for fraud and mistakes to happen that can impact organizations, both financially and otherwise. For example, a single invoice may be paid twice, or at least appear to be paid twice in data records, due to one or more employees engaging in a scheme to embezzle funds, due to a data entry error, or due to other reasons. Regardless of the reasons, fraud and mistakes can have serious consequences. Accordingly, organizations may spend significant effort attempting to detect fraud and mistakes. Such efforts may include monitoring various computing systems utilized by an organization in order to use automated processes to detect potential fraud and mistakes.
Detection of fraud and mistakes, however, can be a rather complex undertaking. Often organizations use different computing systems for different purposes, such as for customer relationship management (CRM), human resources (HR), electronic mail and other communication, and the like. Fraud or mistakes may implement multiple systems and often information represented in one system may be represented in another system in a completely different manner. Further, information may be stored in a manner that provides efficient data access and/or processing, but that is not intuitive. In addition, as organizations become better at detecting fraud and as technology develops, perpetrators of fraud adapt both to avoid detection and to take advantage of opportunities provided by new technologies. Consequently, effective detection of fraud and mistakes may require intimate knowledge of an organization's systems, both in how each system uses and stores information and in how the systems relate to one another, and an ability to quickly adapt quickly. Because of the sophisticated nature of organizations' systems, forensic investigation of potential fraud or mistakes can be rather difficult.